New Anthony Weiner, same as the old

In the week since he took the New York City mayoral race by storm, Anthony Weiner has delighted in the media circus he single-handedly created. He has mixed it up with reporters and taunted longtime adversaries in the same manner that made him a liberal lightning rod in Congress.

It took only a few stops on the trail to make this much clear: The new Anthony Weiner bears an uncanny resemblance to the pugnacious, hard-charging Anthony Weiner of old.

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What to make of Anthony Weiner

POLITICO Junkies: Power plays

The fallen congressman’s comeback attempt prompted a natural question: Was this a bid for personal and professional redemption — or an expression of the narcissism that got him in trouble in the first place? There may never be a clear answer.

But anyone searching for signs of lasting modesty or introspection two years removed from his lewd-picture scandal is, after his initial foray, bound to come away disappointed. In fact, Weiner seems to be banking on New York voters not wanting those qualities in their mayor, anyhow.

“People don’t change,” said Mitchell Moss, a New York University professor and former Mike Bloomberg campaign adviser. “I never really go for the apology tour, the listening tour, all this. Just [the fact of Weiner] being involved in debates is validating his persona. The mere fact that he is on the stage with other mayoral candidates [means] he’s back in the game.”

At every turn, Weiner has professed to voters and reporters that he is a humbled man — “grounded” and a “better person” for taking a step back from public life. And there is little doubt he is genuinely sorry about the hurt he caused his wife, Huma Abedin, and about having to resign after tweeting pictures of his underwear-clad genitals then claiming for days his account was hacked.

“I hope I get a second chance,” Weiner has said repeatedly, including in his rollout video. “I made some big mistakes and I know I let a lot of people down. But I’ve also learned some tough lessons.”

The concept of redemption appeals to all voters, few of whom would cast the first stone. And Weiner has said he hopes voters judge him on the spectrum of his career, not for a lapse in judgment that, while painfully public, was ultimately a personal failing.

Yet as far as politician apology tours go, Weiner’s may be the most perfunctory in recent memory.

After dispensing with his initial round of mea culpas, he has flashed bravado, snappishness with reporters, and plain delight in the media tracking his every utterance (even counting the number of still cameras and New York Post reporters following him around).

In an interview late Wednesday after another mayoral candidate forum, Weiner brushed aside what he clearly considered armchair psychology — “you kind of are [putting me on the therapist’s couch],” he said — but added that he is very much the same person, and voters should want that.

“I will leave it to you to analyze the old versus the new, but to me my views on these things haven’t changed,” he said, referring to the bread-and-butter issues he’s been discussing the past week. “I don’t care about them any less, that’s why I got into the race … I would think a much worse critique would be if somebody appeared, if I appeared, to be a different person than the one I was. This is who I am.”

He continued, “This is not about me. This is about these big issues that people care about … This is not about you, it’s not about me, it’s about a process where people are looking through the lens of their own aspirations and their own concerns. If citizens want to ask me about my state of mind and my personal failings [they can. But the election is] not anything about that.”

Voters, he said, have asked very little about his private life on the stump.